The Swamp Queen
by Rustam
Summary: A synthesis of several Russian folktales, strung together to tell the story of the witch who originally cursed the Beast, only to discover that it was herself she had cursed in her arrogance.


Once upon a time in a far away land, there lived a beautiful princess named Marina. The princess was tall and lovely like a willow tree, with wavy, flowing red hair the color of autumn leaves, and pale skin dappled with roses upon her cheeks. Marina lived in a magical palace of four towers constructed of brilliant white stone at the base of a mighty mountain range that stood in a vast forest between two mighty rivers. This palace lay under ancient and powerful enchantments, proof even against the ravages of time itself, and knew not age, death, or misery. 

The palace always smelled of lavender and spices, and was warm and safe, even during the harsh winters of that part of the world. In fact, the palace gates always opened to the animals of the nearby forest during the winter season, giving them safe haven from the bitter cold. As a result, the palace and the tiny kingdom it ruled over enjoyed the protection of the animals of the forest, as well as their lord, the Great Indrik, Lord of Beasts, who was part bear, part bird, and part dragon, who lived in the highest peaks in the mountain range high above the tallest tower. Great armies had crossed the rivers and entered the dark woods with dreams of conquering the palace's mighty walls and legendary four towers; they returned in scattered bands of stragglers, hungry and weary, mauled by animals. Some never returned at all.

Thus, the life of the princess was free from want and worry. She was cared for by her servants, nursemaids, butlers, scullery maids, chefs, and palace wardens, while she was kept from harm by her soldiers, watchmen, guardsmen, bodyguards, castellans, and footmen. Her mind was challenged by her teachers, tutors, professors, and the learned men who visited her court from far and wide. The children of all her subjects were her friends, companions, cohorts, and co-conspirators, satisfying her child's desire for play and merriment. And through it all, her fondest friend, most earnest companion and most gallant protector was Indrik the Beast King, who guarded all beneath his gentle, yet razor-clawed black wing. Every day was full of happiness and the promise of new adventures, as all her friends helped guide her to adulthood, and every night brought magic and wonder on the wings of dreaming sleep.

Yet one day her dreams were troubled by images that were pleasant, yet confusing. A woman, gentle of face, a softly singing voice and gentle hands that stroked her hair and held her close; a strong, noble man, firm of bearing with arms like the boughs of a tree and a waist like the trunk, who watched over them both with the eyes of a hawk and the tenacity of a bear defending its young. 'You are theirs', whispered a voice in her head. 'They are yours. From them you came.' When she awoke, the princess Marina discovered that her own arms were clenched about her chest so tightly she could barely breathe. Tears ran down cheeks that had never known tears before.

She asked her servants what the images might mean. All had the same answer. 'But a dream, my child,' they said to console her, but none could raise their eyes to meet the questioning green eyes of the princess. 'But a dream, your majesty,' said her butlers and wardens and castellans and librarians and tutors. 'A dream, Marina,' said all her friends and playmates. 'Just a dream.' Yet none could raise their eyes to her piercing, inquisitive jadeite gaze, one that many said could pull honesty right out of a man's soul. However, the dream had raised questions no one could answer. Where do I come from? Marina had asked this question before, as a little girl. Her teachers had told her that her world had been created like the dawning of a new day created the world anew every morning. One day, it had all just been here, with her at the center. She had no parents, unlike the other children. She didn't need them! 'You have all of us,' they told her. 'We'll take care of you.'

They had, however, given each other funny looks and stammered a lot when they tried to explain. In any event, the question had satisfied the little girl, but Marina was getting older, and would one day soon rule as Queen. But for now, she eventually came to believe that her dreams were nothing more than idle fancies of her sleeping mind, since everyone told her so. It had only happened once, anyway. Soon it passed out of her mind completely.

Until one week later, the dream came again. This time, her guards and her nursemaids came running to her rooms at the sounds of her cries, where they found the poor princess once again clenching her arms across her chest, her knees pulled up against them. 'Mama,' the girl discovered herself to be sobbing as she was awakened. 'Papa...'

No one could face the princess now with her ever-increasing number of questions. Who were they? Did she dream them because she wanted parents? Or did she dream them because they WERE her parents? But none would answer. Her insistence only caused a stone-faced, downcast silence among the men, while some of the women burst into tears and ran from the room. The truth must be terrible indeed. But no more terrible, Marina thought to herself, than the pain in my breast when I awaken in the night. The dreams themselves brought her nothing but joy and peace in her dreaming life; but the terrible feeling of emptiness she felt upon waking from them was like no pain she'd ever experienced. She had no word for such a thing as 'loss'.

One day she decided she could face her dreams no longer, so she did what she always did when times seemed their darkest. She walked from her room in the tallest of the four towers of the palace to the tiny parapet at the very top, and waited for her best friend, Indrik the Beast King. For a day and a night she waited, refusing food and refusing to speak to any of her subjects. Until finally one night he appeared, his leather wings carrying him silently down from the tallest peaks to perch upon a massive ledge overlooking the palace. His crow's talons dug furrows in the stone as he settled upon his haunches, craning his massive neck down to the edge of the tower, mouth lowering to just above the stone itself. His two giant, curving horns, sharper than any spear, curving into the night above. Usually the princess would run forward and hug the great Beast's snout, giggling like a little girl, while Indrik would snuffle and try his draconic best not to allow his mouth, which had carved valleys and crushed mountains in its teeth, to smile. This evening was different however, for Marina was so distraught and lost in her sadness that she didn't even raise her head from her knees at the King's arrival. He had to let out a quick snort of hot breath from his nostrils before his human friend would even raise her head, and only then did he find her fiery hair bedraggled, her once-rosy-cheeked face streaked grey with tears. Few things in his thousands of years of life had shocked the great Indrik so much as the sight of this once perpetually happy child reduced to misery.

"What troubles you, my child?" he asked, his voice deeper and more resonant than the rumble of an earthquake, quieter than the whispering of a brook.

"My sleep is broken by troubling dreams," she confessed to him, wiping her eyes and sniffling, rising to her feet and attempting to find the necessary composure to greet her best friend. "A man and a woman," she continued, smoothing the wrinkles in her robes and dress, rubbing her cheek with her sleeve. "The woman is soft and delicate, and speaks to me in a voice like springtime, calling me 'Marinushka' and telling me she loves me always. The man is strong and terrible as a thunderstorm, but gentle as a wispy cloud when he speaks to us. He holds us close and keeps us safe." She staggered toward Indrik, wishing to stand before him proudly in a manner befitting a princess. In the end, however, she rushed toward him, found his neck, and buried her face in his mane as she'd done when she was very little. "I know neither," she whispered as his jeweled eyes turned to the side, head tilting to allow her to climb upon his neck and hide in his mane like a field of tall grass. "But their absence is like an arrow lodged in my chest. I cry because I cannot stop. What does this mean? Am I mad?"

The great Beast only rumbled in reply, his massive neck craning slowly upward as the girl grabbed hold upon the hair of his mane and gripped it tightly. Throughout all this she was unafraid, for often the mighty creature had taken her flying to ease what now seemed to her the quite trifling pains of childhood. As his head reached the sky, Indrik let out a deafening, barking roar and raised his wings, causing vast flocks of night birds to rise in dark clouds from their trees in deference to his presence. Although, as Indrik once explained to Marina, it was really a courtesy to alert any nighttime air traffic to his presence. With a mighty downward lunge of his leather-skinned wings, the great Beast leapt from his ledge and soared into the starlit sky.

The night air whipped past Marina, her hair a flaming trail in the breeze. It served to lift her spirits, her tears scoured from her eyes by the rushing wind of their passage. For what seemed like hours they flew upward in steadily ascending spirals, passing jagged peaks, gnarled crags, towering spires, even what appeared to be the ruins of other castles and watchtowers, dark and silent, brooding in the moonlight. For a moment she attempted to ask her friend who these towers and silent keeps had belonged to, but the whooshing air stole her voice whenever she opened her mouth. In the end, she kept silent, and stared as the land beneath grew farther and farther away. The princess had never been carried this high before.

Finally, when it seemed that they flew within sight of the tallest peak, its summit lost amid darkness-laden midnight clouds, Indrik alighted upon a small plateau of bare rock, scree, and rubble. Lightning stabbed from out of the rumbling clouds with periodic brightness. High above, set against a nearby sheer cliff that fell away past the plateau to nothingness, was the mouth of a cave, steam streaming from it in a slow, wispy trail. Legends said that a vast, boiling undergound lake lay within Indrik's mountain, in which his ancient soul found repose. "My home," explained Indrik, before turning his gaze to what appeared to be a large stone block carved from the solid rock of the plateau itself, a short distance away. "There," the Beast King rumbled, lowering his head to allow the princess to shimmy off of his neck and hop to the ground. "There you will find the answers you seek."

The princess, with a boldness born of never having to know fear or uncertainty, stepped forward to the monument, a simple rectangle of grey stone, with these words inscribed upon it:

"_Upon This Mountain_

_King Yuri Dolgoroki_

_And his beloved Queen Anastasia_

_Watch Forever_

_The Land Between the Moskva and Neglina Rivers_."

"Your father and mother," Indrik explained, bowing his head as Marina turned back to face him. "My friends."

Indrik settled upon his haunches, as did princess Marina, the night stretching onward while he told his story. I was only a pup, the Beast King explained to the wide-eyed, wondering princess, when he'd been wounded from arrows fired by a marauding horde of Kipchak soldiers. He had fallen to the ground and feared for his own death when a great warrior had burst from the trees, his skill with the sword and lance so great that the Kipchaks had fled in terror lest they be cut to pieces. The warrior had picked up the young Beastling and carried him home, to a great stone castle he was building at the base of the mountains. 'Yuri is my name,' the warrior told Indrik, as he and his young wife Anna nursed him back to health. 'I am a prince, but as the youngest son of my father Vladimir Monomakh, I am a prince with no country. So I have decided to make my country here, and will protect and shelter all who wish to live here. Even creatures of the forest who Man hates and fears.'

As Indrik had slowly but surely recovered his health, he was soon entranced by the young warrior's vision, a vision that had also entranced Anna, Yuri's wife and once a princess of the great city of Kiev, and all who now busily constructed the great palace of the four towers. Anna, however, had been entranced by more than simply Yuri's vision, following him into the wilderness and an uncertain future. When the Beast King was well enough, he took flight once more, and went out into the forest to tell all the creatures that lived among the trees about the wondrous human who, alone among his kind, did not hunt the creatures of the wild for sport or food or to keep them from his fields, and contented himself with the dumb beasts man had raised as livestock since the beginning of time. 'We trust no man,' the creatures of the forest had told him. 'But we trust you, lord of Beasts. You, we follow.' And thus, the two brothers in spirit, Indrik and Yuri, ruled over the land as one.

Until one day, when their peace and idyll was shattered. King Yuri went off to War against the Cumans, and never returned, until Indrik had flown out himself to recover the body from the bloody battlefield of Gorodets, a village that had voluntarily joined his kingdom and that he had sworn to protect. His Queen Anna was shattered by the loss; so much did she love both him and their newborn daughter Marina that she considered Yuri to be one of half of all that was herself, while Marina comprised the other half. Utterly rent with grief, Anna soon grew petrified with fear for the life of her daughter, for her sadness was so terrible that she did not trust herself or what she would do if it's hold upon her grew too much to bear. So it was that in the dead of night she simply walked out onto the very parapet upon which princess Marina would later enjoy many evenings' conversation with the mighty Indrik, carefully climbed the wall, and calmly walked off the edge, falling to her death.

"You were very young," Indrik told the solemn princess upon the mountaintop. "No one thought you would remember them. Everyone thought it was better this way. But never forget that they loved you very much. Your father swore me to an oath that I would always protect you. And I always have."

The princess said no words for a long, long time, so long that noble Indrik began to worry. Until as the morning sun broke over the distant horizon, she raised her head, and smiled. To know this at long last, she told him, to the know the source of the pain in her heart enabled her to understand it. And, in a way, to feel close to the parents she'd never known. "Now I'm glad that I know them, and know of them," she said. "And that helps me bear the sadness of their loss."

The princess had never been out so late. Upon her return to the palace, most of her subjects were there to greet her in their nightclothes, the children clinging to the skirts of their mothers, all staring tense and worriedly at their princess, with her ragged, sooty garments, windblown hair, and face crusted with old tears. But when she smiled, relief washed over them like a wave, and harmony in the palace was restored. 'We're sorry we never told you,' said her apologetic servants, guardsmen, nurses, bakers, clerks, and tutors. 'We loved your parents so dearly that it was too terrible to think about.' Through their recollections and reminiscences, and those of Indrik as well, the princess learned many wonderful things about her parents, and the kind of people they had been.

Something, however, still troubled the young princess, but it was of a shade more subtle than her earlier malaise. Instead of cries in the night or unexplainable sadness, this new concern manifested itself as a momentary frown, or a distant look. An occasional moment of intent gaze, staring at nothing, that would vanish a moment later as the princess did her best to return to her former, carefree self. But as more and more of her subjects noticed her demeanor, the more and more of them grew troubled as well, until it was as if a cloud hung over the palace. Princess Marina was a thoughtful and observant princess, and knew the effect she was having upon her people. So it was that one day she summoned them all before her in the throne room, and for the first time, took her seat upon the throne. After thanking them for coming and for being such good friends as well as loyal subjects, she went to the heart of the matter.

"Soon I will come of age," she told them. "And I will become Queen. When that happens I will rule over all the kingdom as did my father. You have all raised me well and properly, and I am grateful. But I do not have the experience of having a mother and father to provide for me the models of the adult they wished me to become; nor do I have the wisdom in properly ruling a kingdom that the King and Queen would have provided me had they been alive. Therefore, I must leave you for a time." A silence descended over the throne room, as her subjects grappled with the idea of being without their beloved princess. "Only for a little while," she reassured them. "I mean to travel abroad in the world, to gain wisdom and insight, and see the conditions of real life. And thus, gain the knowledge I need to be a proper Queen, and fulfill the legacy of my father." She bowed her head to them. "And to make you all proud of me."

Cheers and applause greeted Princess Marina's announcement, though mixed with tears and sorrow. Their princess was leaving, but she would one day return, as a Queen, fit to rule her father's kingdom. And so it was that all the people of the palace, all the people who lived in the mountains, and the forest, and along the river, and the fields beyond, and all the animals and creatures that lived among them, gathered together in vast crowds around the castle of the four towers as their princess, clad in simple traveling clothes atop the highest tower, once more climbed aboard the neck of Indrik the Beast King, who had offered to fly her beyond the forest to the mysterious and distant lands to the west. The Beast King barked a roar as he rose into the sky, answered by the hails and farewells of the gathered throngs.

As they rose far above the clouds themselves, one of Marina's hands holding tight to the Beast King's mane, the other keeping a steady grip upon her pack, Indrik held his wings out to the side and glided for a few moments, his head turning to face the girl. "I swore an oath to your father to always watch over you," he told her. "I never pledged to care for you as I did for him or your mother." A moment passed. "That you are my friend, has come to pass on its own. You will always have a place within me, Marina. No matter where you go, you will always live here in my heart." Marina said nothing, her mouth too busy keeping the sobs at bay. She merely lifted some of the fine, silky hairs of his mane, pressing them against her cheek, to help dry the tears that dampened her face.

Thus, Princess Marina traveled far and wide throughout the land, seeing many strange and wondrous things and meeting people from all walks of life. She beheld the Hagia Sophia in Constantinopolis, which legend said hung from Heaven by a golden chain; she set eyes upon Pyramids, built by men so long forgotten that even their names had been dust for thousands of years; she beheld the whole of Rome from atop each one of its Seven Hills, looking down upon the eternal city all around her. Many books she read, many texts she studied, the knowledge she absorbed like a sponge. In great libraries and universities she studied the sciences of agriculture and physics, the better to understand the world of the seen, while in the hidden, dark corners of the world where ancient rites and magicks were still practiced, she grew versed in the ways of the unseen as well. The world was a vast and magnificent place, but also a terrible one. The aftermath of many wars, battles and mayhem she witnessed firsthand, the stench of death rising up as the blood of the fallen seeped into the ground. But in this, new life was born, the bodies of the dead fertilizing new growth, life renewing itself once more. It was in this way that she became a one-woman crusader of sorts, seeking to right wrongs where she found them, perhaps making the land a better place for her having visited it.

And so it was that once she traveled within a land called Gevaudan, that was far, far away from her homeland. It was so far that no one had any maps that even showed the general area in which her homeland resided. She had heard of a young prince whose father the King had died, as her father had died, but this prince was a vain and snobbish churl who had loudly declared that he desired only beautiful things within his presence. All things he deemed ugly were to be roughly cast aside. Her sympathy for the boy's background waned even more sharply as she traveled nearer to his lands, hearing a tale of how the boy's henchmen had brutally beaten an old beggar half to death for the crime of begging for alms outside the castle walls. Marina was determined to teach the child a lesson he would never forget.

Using the abilities she had been practicing and honing, she wreathed herself in the guise of an old woman. Carrying a bundle of beautiful flowers, she presented herself to the castle gate. "I have heard of his lordship desiring beautiful things," she told the guards. "I wish to make a present to him of this beautiful bouquet, unmatched in loveliness among all the flowers of the Gevaudan."

The guards had a dilemma. The flowers, grown by Marina herself, were indeed quite stunning. The Prince would want them at any cost. But the woman was old and grey, and would remind his lordship of the ugly realities of eventual old age. So they did what any guards would do and asked their commander what their course of action should be. The commander, perplexed, relayed the question to the Guard Captain. The Guard Captain passed the buck along to the Chamberlain, who was scratching his head in consternation when he suddenly noticed the disguised Marina bowing low and presenting herself to the Prince as he sat on his throne. She'd snuck in through the gate while the guards were debating.

"Indeed," said the Prince, clearly awed at the gift of the flowers. "These lovelies have no match in all the world. But you, old crone," he said, waving his hand and snapping at Marina. "You displease me with your disgusting presence. Get out before I have you thrashed for your decrepitude!"

"So, young prince," Marina remarked, in an artificially gravelly voice. "You reject the beauty I might once have been, that which I might hold deep inside, and that which I have provided for you, all because my form lacks the same?"

"Of course," grunted the Prince. "Guards, I'm bored. Put the plants in water or something after you toss this hag over the wall."

"Foolish boy," bellowed Marina, as she swept her disguise away, standing up proud and regal as magical energy coursed about her, green eyes blazing at the suddenly terrified young prince who chose that moment to bravely hide behind the throne. "Behold my true form that you are so quick to reject! Your plaything I am certainly not." The guards quailed in terror and ran from the room, not particularly holding much loyalty to the venal young prince in any event.

"Mercy, sorceress," whimpered the prince, cowering upon the floor.

"I will show you greater mercy than you have shown your subjects," Marina replied, gathering her energies for a terrible spell. Dark stormheads began to roll in from the ocean, lightning crackling within them as they blotted out the sun outside. With a crash and a roar, bolts of the same lightning struck the castle in multiple places, scouring it with terrible energy. Servants and guards screamed and tried to flee in terror, but soon clattered to the floor as, to their horror, they assumed the forms of objects. Bowls, plates, candlesticks, brooms, mops, paintings, spitoons; in the way the prince had treated them all (and the way they'd allowed themselves to be treated), like little more than household objects for his pleasure, so now did they assume the form of inanimate things. As the prince had never respected his home, causing whatever sort of damage or mess might suit his fancy, expecting the servants to clean up after him, his once impressive castle now became a musty, stained, overgrown ruin, vegetation springing to life all about the keep from the surrounding landscape and overrunning the stones and marble halls in a matter of moments. The spell was wondrous and terrible indeed. Most terrible of all, however, was the fate of the prince himself. For as he watched events unfold with mounting shock, to his further horror he discovered that his own form had begun to change. Rippling and metamorphosing, his youthful skin mottling with hard flesh and wiry fur, his outward appearance took on the form of a vicious, immense beast, with a vulpine snout, sharp claws for tearing and dagger-like teeth for rending all in their path.

Marina the sorceress selected one flower, a blue peony, allowing the others to fall to the floor, soon swept away by violent winds coursing through the windows and consumed by the rampant vegetation coursing through the halls of the castle, which had now become a tomb for the prince's former happiness. "This flower is the most beautiful of all," she informed the whimpering monstrosity that had been the prince, which sobbed and howled like the beast he had become. "You who claimed to devote your life to beauty, will now devote your life to the beauty of this flower. Protect it as you would no other thing of this world. For it is tied to you now with the strings of Fate. You have until the last petal of the peony falls from the stem to find one person who will swear to you unconditional love, despite your terrifying aspect... or my curse will be yours forevermore."

With a choked roar, the Beast the prince had become attempted to race toward Marina upon uncertain legs, unused to their newfound animal nature, his only thought one of revenge and to rip his tormentor limb-from-limb. The sorceress merely smirked upon him, casting the flower aside with an easy wave of her hand. The Beast howled, lunging sideways as his fore and hind legs scrabbled against the ground, only just catching the peony awkwardly in his paws before it would have sailed out the window on a sudden gust of wind. When he turned around once more, the sorceress was gone.

Hearing his howls as she walked from the castle's gate, now overgrown by creepers and weeds, Marina hmmph'd to herself a little, taking a last look behind her at her handiwork. "Call ME a hag, will he," she muttered, and then went upon her way.

And now the prince had a serious problem. Could he find someone to care for him before the last peony petal fell away? And he wouldn't be searching only for himself. Now his people depended upon him to find someone who could love one such as he, despite his appearance, in order to undo the spell and make them human once more. Could the vain, shallow prince find it within himself to do such a thing?

Well, actually he did, in a tale told elsewhere, and probably better than I could. We'll just leave it at that.

But that's another story. With the spell upon the Prince broken and undone, the magic could only return to its source and visit the same fate upon the one who had cast the spell in the first place. For Marina, in her arrogance at presuming to judge another and her inexperience with forces she did not understand, had forgotten the one rule of using magic that must never be forgotten by all who practice it. That all magic exacts a price upon the user. And such a terrible spell that Marina had cast exacted a terrible price indeed.

For at the very moment the Princess was returning to her homeland upon the back of Indrik the Beast King, at the very moment she held up her hands to wave to the gathered crowds, who'd known for years that much of the joy had left the kingdom at the Princess' departure, and that with Marina's return then joy would return as well, at the very moment that Princess Marina became Queen, returning wiser and more worldly to her tiny little corner of the world; at that moment, a woman known to history only as Beauty was tearfully agreeing to marry a fearsome-looking creature known as Beast, declaring unconditional love for him, forever and ever. At that moment, a vast agglomeration of magical energy that had been building moment by moment over many years as the spell gathered power on its own, working to eventually make itself permanent should the Beast fail in his quest, was released. And it had nowhere to go but to follow the path of least resistance back to its original source, which was, in all her hubris, the Princess Marina herself.

As she watched with horrified disbelief, the great mountains that had comprised her kingdom suddenly gave a great rumble and a bellowing roar, and began to crumble and sink into the very Earth itself amid the terrified screams of her subjects. A kind of water that was little more than oozing, tepid black slime bubbled up from beneath the ground and spread across the forest floor, accompanied by clinging gases filled with the stench of decay. The trees of the forest grew gnarled and twisted, creeping vegetation curling their green and grasping claws out of the ground and smothering them in a death's embrace. The soil that had given the forest life now became dank and poisonous, like the rest of the nightmarish landscape around it. Clouds boiled across the sky, sinking low, soon covering all the kingdom in a dense, smoky, pungent mist. The entire forest was soon a fetid, rank bog, heavy with the torrid smells of disease and rot.

As the citizens and animals of her kingdom vainly attempted to flee in their panic, they began to undergo a transformation into the grotesque as well. As they staggered and fell to the ground, their bodies transformed into dark and vicious caricatures of the creatures of the night, in the same way their kingdom was becoming a ghastly caricature of a marshland in its turn. Animals became the creeping, crawling terrors of imagination, such as rabid, red-eyed rats with immense, nail-like teeth, scaly lizards dripping with slime, wart-encrusted toads, blood-suckling vampire bats. Birds became insects, some garishly oversize, others smaller than the smallest flea, while their children became hordes of festering maggots. The creatures of the water became venomous snakes, or sluggish, lethargic, leathery creatures that spent silent agonies beneath the waters until the unwary or unlucky allowed themselves to venture into the stagnant marshes. Men, women and children, however; these became crows. Vast, dark clouds of mournfully cawing crows, calling to one another across the swamp, vainly searching for their lost dreams of happiness and human contact.

As her waking nightmare engulfed her kingdom, the princess and her mount both fell to the ground at the river's edge, crashing through the chalky ruins of what had once been the palace of her father, now choked with stone-eating vines and slowly collapsing under its own weight. Struggling to regain her footing, the ground sinking with a wet hiss beneath her, she opened her eyes and gazed into the filmy, boiling water of the riverbank. Distorted beneath gaseous bubbles and sickly wet steam, she beheld staring back at her the face of the old crone that she had worn upon her introduction to the Prince of whom she had made a beast. Moaning and wheezing in her effort and panic, as her now-aged, brittle old bones and muscles protested with every motion, she turned to gaze upon her friend, Indrik. She could only watch, wailing and weeping in her old woman's thin, reedy voice, as the mighty Beast King's body flopped up and down upon the ground, shaking the ground with each spasm, and twisting in unnatural motions as it slowly but inexorably formed itself into the shape of a simple, one story house, made entirely of bone. Perched upon leathery feet like those of a crow, the only part of the structure vaguely resembling the Beast King's former body.

As night fell, the unfortunate crone who had been a princess made another discovery. For then her shape metamorphosed and transformed once again, this time into the terrible beast-shape with which she had once enchanted the Prince. Only this Beast had the mind of a beast, predatory and cunning, full only of bloodlust. She could only return to her own mind with the dawn of the next morning, to carry herself once more on her decrepit legs back to dwell in her house made of bone that walked upon crows' feet, as she would have to do now for every dawn thereafter while her curse remained. And she would return, no matter how far away she was when she awoke once more to herself, or how enfeebled old age had made her. For you see, her best friend had fulfilled the promise that he'd made so long ago. He would always have a place within him for the Princess Marina. So she could never abandon Indrik the Beast King.

And now the witch Baba Yaga, the name by which Marina came to be known, had to find someone who would declare to her unconditional love, despite the wretched creature she had become. Should she fail to do so before the last stone of the palace built by her father's dream fell to the earth and sank into the swamp of her vanity, then the curse would be hers, forevermore.

Unlike the fortunate Prince, history does not enlighten us as to whether or not she succeeded.


End file.
